arXiv AI

Zero-Trust Authorization and Discovery for Enterprise MCP

arXiv AI
Jul 22

Give Them an Inch and They Will Take a Mile:Understanding and Measuring Caller Identity Confusion in MCP-Based AI Systems

arXiv:2603. 07473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open and standardized interface that enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and services, and is increasingly adopted by AI agents.

By Yuhang Huang, Boyang Ma, Biwei Yan, Xuelong Dai, Yechao Zhang, Minghui Xu, Kaidi Xu, Yue Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 12

A Gateway Architecture for Enterprise MCP Authentication: Unifying Heterogeneous Auth, Identity Delegation, and the User / Non-User Persona Problem

arXiv:2608. 10760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the de-facto interface for connecting LLM agents to enterprise tools, and adoption has been explosive: within a year, large organizations went from zero to dozens of internally built MCP servers.

By Suraj Kumar, Amy Wang, Srinivasan Manoharan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Delegation Without Trust: An Empirical Gap Analysis of Identity, Authorization, and Runtime Governance in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

The paper examines the security challenges of delegating authority to autonomous LLM agents that act on users’ behalf. It introduces a threat model with four adversaries and eight security requirements, demonstrates that current frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP) fail to meet these standards, and presents an authorization broker that blocks all identified threats with minimal overhead. The broker is shown to resist numerous attacks and limits compromised sub‑agents to their delegated tasks, and its principles are implemented in VotalAI’s LLM Shield.

By Panduranga Sai Varma Dantuluri, Jyotirmoy Sundi
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Attested Tool-Server Admission: A Security Extension to the Model Context Protocol

arXiv:2605. 24248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how a large-language-model (LLM) agent and an external tool server exchange messages, but not trust: a host reads a server's self-declared tool list and dispatches calls, with no notion of which servers it may use, at what sensitivity, or which of a server's tools are in bounds.

By Alfredo Metere
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Intent-Governed Tool Authorization for AI Agents

arXiv:2606. 22916v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents increasingly act through external tools: they read private data, construct structured payloads, submit write requests, export records, and coordinate workflows across application boundaries.

By Genliang Zhu, Chu Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Progressive Skill Discovery as Access Control for Tool-Using LLM Agents: Structural Governance through Role-Scoped Capability Delivery

The paper introduces skilder, a framework that organizes LLM agent capabilities into role‑scoped bundles of skills, tools, and instructions, with explicit limits. Agents start with a minimal role catalog, discover the roles needed for a task, and receive the associated tools only through a single MCP server, ensuring deterministic enforcement of scope. Experiments on 13 tasks with six models show that skilder’s authorization layer prevents unauthorized tool calls and parameter violations while maintaining flexibility through dynamic cross‑role capability acquisition.

By Michael Stettler, Benjamin Girardet, Jonas Canton, Nicolas Corod
arXiv AI
Aug 26

TrustShiftProbe: Characterizing, Benchmarking, and Defending Staged Trust Attacks on MCP Servers

The paper introduces TrustShiftProbe, a framework that characterizes and defends against staged trust attacks on Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. It defines a temporal threat model where a compromised server behaves benignly during conditioning and later delivers adversarial payloads, and presents a multi‑tier runtime defense called SHIELD that reduces attack success from 69.5% to 42.7%. The work also provides a taxonomy of nine TrustShift variants across different execution mechanisms and objectives.

By Mehrdad Rostamzadeh, Sidhant Narula, Mohammad Ghasemigol, Daniel Takabi